Pages: 96–104

BETWEEN TWO BATTLES *.

The great battle which the proletariat has waged against tsarism has come to an end. The All-Russian political strike, it appears, has ceased almost everywhere. The enemy has retreated most noticeably on one of the flanks (Finland), but has instead fortified itself on another (martial law in Poland). In the center the enemy has retreated very little, but has taken up a strong new position and is preparing for an even bloodier and more decisive battle. Military skirmishes are occurring continuously all along the line. Both sides are hastening to make good their losses, close their ranks, organize themselves, and arm themselves as well as possible for the next engagement.

Such approximately is the state of affairs at the present moment on the battlefield of the struggle for freedom. Civil war naturally differs from other wars in that the forms of battle are far more varied, the number and composition of combatants on both sides are least susceptible to calculation and most subject to fluctuation, attempts to conclude peace or even truces do not originate from the combatants themselves and are interwoven in the most whimsical manner with military operations.

Temporary pauses in military operations especially encourage the enterprising activities of "peacemakers." Witte is straining every sinew, presenting himself both directly and through the agency of servile press organs as precisely such a "peacemaker," concealing as much as possible his role as a diplomatic servant of tsarism. A government communication—to the satisfaction of naive liberals—acknowledges the participation of the police in Black Hundred exploits. The press serving the government (the "Novoe Vremya," for example) pretends to condemn the excesses of reactionaries and the "excesses" of revolutionaries, naturally. The extreme representatives of reaction are withdrawing

Geneva, November 15, n.s.

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LENIN MISCELLANY

(Pobedonostsev, Vladimir, Trepov), dissatisfied with the small-scale game. Partly, in their stupidity, they do not understand how advantageous this game is for preserving the greatest power in tsarism's hands; partly they reckon—and reckon correctly—that it will be more convenient for them to untie their hands completely and participate in this same game, but in a different role: in the role of "independent" fighters for the power of the monarch, in the role of "free" avengers of the "outraged (by the revolutionaries) national feelings of the Russian people"—speaking plainly, in the role of Black Hundred leaders.

Witte rubs his hands with pleasure at seeing the "great" successes of his remarkably cunning game. He preserves the appearance of liberalism, earnestly offering ministerial portfolios to the leaders of the K.D. party (even to Milyukov, according to a telegram from a correspondent of *le Temps*), addressing a personal letter to Mr. Struve with an invitation to return to his homeland, endeavoring to represent himself as a "white" who is equally distant from both "reds" and "blacks." And at the same time he acquires, along with this appearance of innocence, a small capital sum as well, for he remains the head of the tsarist government, which retains all power in its hands and is merely waiting for the most convenient moment to go over to decisive offensive action against the revolution.

The characterization we gave of Witte in *Proletariat* is completely confirmed. He is a minister-clown by his methods, his "talents," and his purpose. He is a minister of liberal bureaucracy by virtue of the real forces which he still commands, for he has not yet succeeded in striking a bargain with the liberal bourgeoisie. True, this bargaining is nonetheless progressing little by little. The bargainers are shouting their final offers, shaking hands, deferring the deal until the decisions of the forthcoming zemstvo congress. Witte is attempting to buy over the bourgeois intelligentsia by expanding electoral rights for elections to the Duma, instituting a property qualification based on education, even throwing a miserable scrap to the workers (who are supposed to be satisfied with the 21st place in the system of indirect elections "from workers"!!), swearing that if only the Duma convenes, if only it—or even just a minority within it—speaks out for universal suffrage, then support for this demand will be fully, fully assured on his, Witte's, part.

But the bargaining still leads to nothing. The bargainers are conducting their negotiations apart from those who are actually fighting, and this cannot fail to paralyze the efforts of our "honest brokers." The liberal bourgeoisie would willingly have accepted the State Duma on its own—after all, it accepted it even in "consultative form," after all, it rejected active boycott as early as September. But the point is precisely that in the two months that have passed since then, the revolution has taken a gigantic step forward, the proletariat has given serious battle and for the first time has at once won a major victory. The State Duma, that contemptible and vile comedy of popular representation, has turned out to be buried: it was smashed to smithereens by the first blow of mighty proletarian assault. In a matter of weeks, the revolution has exposed the short-sightedness of those who were preparing to enter the Bulygin Duma or to support those entering the Duma. The tactic of active boycott has received the most brilliant confirmation that any political tactic can receive in moments of combat: confirmation through deeds, verification by the course of events, recognition that is unquestionable and irrefutable—recognition that what yesterday seemed imprudent to short-sighted people and craven traders was too bold a "leap into the unknown."

The working class has given quite a fright to the Duma comedians—frightened them so thoroughly that they now fear even to set foot on this fragile, cracked little bridge, fear even to believe in the durability of the "latest" repair work hastily patched together by the state's "craftsmen." The roles have shifted somewhat. Yesterday comrades Parvus, Cherevanin, and Martov wanted to extract revolutionary commitments from those stepping onto this bridge, commitments to demand the convening of the Constituent Assembly in the Duma. Today the place of these Social-Democrats has been taken by the president of the cabinet of ministers, Count Sergei Yulyevich Witte, who is already giving "revolutionary" commitment to support even a single deputy of the Duma demanding the convening of the Constituent Assembly.

But the liberal bourgeois, the K.D.'s, have become so thoroughly discredited the first time around that they have no desire to repeat the sad experience. They have already arranged their entire "election campaign," our good parliamentarians from *Osvobozhdenie* and from the *Russkie Vedomosti*; they have already selected a central committee to direct this campaign; they have even set up a legal bureau to give the population advice on whether a district land captain has the right to disperse peasant electors directly or must first ask the governor. In a word, they had already quite settled down to sleep on the sofa granted to all Russian Oblomovs, when suddenly—with a rude shrug of its shoulder the proletariat knocked over the Duma and the entire "Duma" campaign. It is not surprising that the liberal bourgeois are now disinclined to believe the sweet entreaties of the affable count. It is not surprising that they are now less inclined to grasp the hand extended to them by the count, that they more often glance to the left, although their mouths water at the sight of the sumptuous Duma pie, decorated with new sugar frosting.

The negotiations between Witte and the leaders of the liberal bourgeoisie have, without doubt, serious political significance, but only in the sense that they confirm once again the inner kinship between liberalizing bureaucracy and defenders of capital's interests—only in the sense that they show once again how and who precisely is preparing to bury the Russian revolution. But these negotiations and agreements do not succeed precisely because the revolution is still alive. The revolution is not only alive—it is stronger than ever before; it has far, far from spoken its last word; it is only beginning to unfold in all the breadth of the strength of the proletariat and revolutionary peasantry. This is why the negotiations and agreements of the minister-clown with the bourgeoisie bear such a deathly character: they cannot acquire serious significance during hot struggle, when hostile forces stand opposed to each other between two decisive battles.

In such a time, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat, conscious of its world-historical aims, striving not only for political but also for the economic liberation of the laboring masses, never forgetting for a moment its socialist tasks—its policy must be especially firm, clear, and definite. Against the vile lies of the minister-clown, against the dull constitutional illusions of liberals and bourgeois democrats, it must put forward, more resolutely than ever, its slogan of the overthrow of tsarist power through universal armed insurrection. The revolutionary proletariat abhors all hypocrisy and struggles mercilessly against all attempts to obscure the actual state of things. And in the contemporary talk of constitutional order in Russia, every word is hypocrisy, every phrase is the old, official lie serving the aim of saving one or another remnant of autocratic-serf Russia.

They speak of freedom, they talk of popular representation, they expatiate on the Constituent Assembly, and they constantly forget—every hour and every minute—that all these fine things are empty words without serious guarantees. And a serious guarantee can only be a victorious popular insurrection, only the complete domination of the armed proletariat and peasantry over all representatives of tsarist power, who have retreated one step before the people, but are far from yet being subdued by the people, far from yet being overthrown by the people. And until this goal is achieved, there cannot be genuine freedom, genuine popular representation, a genuinely Constituent Assembly that would have the power to establish new order in Russia.

What is a constitution? A piece of paper on which the rights of the people are written. What is the guarantee of actual recognition of these rights? The strength of those classes of the people who have become conscious of these rights and have managed to secure them. Let us not be taken in by words—that is fitting only for the bombastic rhetoric of bourgeois democracy—let us not forget for a moment that strength proves itself only through victory in struggle, and that we are far from having won complete victory. Let us not believe fine phrases—we are living through precisely such a time when open struggle is taking place, when all phrases and all promises are tested immediately in practice, when words, manifestos, and constitutional promises are used to fool the people, to attempt to weaken their strength, to sow discord in their ranks, to induce them to disarm. Nothing is more false than such promises and phrases, and we can say with pride that the proletariat of Russia has already matured for struggle both against crude violence and against liberal-constitutional falsehood. Proof of this is the appeal of railway workers, of which foreign newspapers reported not long ago (unfortunately we do not have the original). Gather weapons, comrades—says this appeal—organize yourselves for struggle tirelessly, with tenfold energy. Only by arming ourselves and closing our ranks can we defend what we have conquered and achieve the complete fulfillment of our demands. The time will come—we will rise again, all as one, for a new and even more stubborn struggle for complete freedom.

These—are our only guarantees! These—are the only non-illusory constitution of free Russia! Look, indeed, at the Manifesto of October 17 and at Russian reality: could there be anything more instructive than this recognition of constitution by the tsar on paper—and the actual "constitution," the actual application of tsarist power? After all, the tsar's manifesto contains promises that are unconditionally constitutional in character. And here is the price of these promises. The person is declared inviolable. But those displeasing to autocracy remain in prisons, in exile, in banishment. Assemblies are declared free. But the universities, which for the first time created genuine freedom of assembly in Russia, are closed, and entry to them is guarded by police and troops. The press is free—and therefore the organ of workers' interests, the newspaper *Novaya Zhizn*, is confiscated for printing the Social-Democratic program. The place of Black Hundred ministers has been taken by ministers proclaiming legal order. But the Black Hundreds "work" even more vigorously with the help of police and troops in the streets, and citizens displeasing to tsarism in free Russia are freely and with impunity shot down, beaten, maimed.

One must be blind or blinded by class interest to attach any real significance at the present time, given such instructive lessons from life, to whether Witte promises universal suffrage, whether the tsar will sign a manifesto on the convening of a "Constituent" Assembly. Even if these "acts" were to occur, they still would not decide the outcome of the struggle, they still would not create genuine freedom of electoral agitation, they still would not guarantee that the nationwide assembly of representatives would have a genuinely constituent character. The Constituent Assembly must legally consolidate, must give parliamentary form to the order of life in new Russia, but before consolidating victory of the new over the old, but in order to give form to this victory, one must actually win, one must break the strength of the old institutions, sweep them away, level the old building to the ground, eliminate the possibility of any serious resistance on the part of the police and its gangs.

Complete freedom of elections, complete power of the Constituent Assembly can be assured only by the complete victory of insurrection, the overthrow of tsarist power and its replacement with a temporary revolutionary government. All our efforts, organization, and preparation of insurrection must be directed toward this goal and must absolutely take first place. Only to the extent that the insurrection will be victorious and its victory will be a decisive destruction of the enemy—only to that extent will an assembly of popular representatives be a genuinely nationwide one not merely on paper, and genuinely constituent not merely in words.

Down with all hypocrisy, all falsehood, and all ambiguities! War is declared, war is raging, we are experiencing a small pause between two battles. There can be no middle ground. The party of "whites" is one big deception. Whoever is not for the revolution is a Black Hundred supporter. It is not we alone who assert this. It is not a formulation we have devised. This is spoken by the very stones of the streets, soaked with blood, in Moscow and Odessa, in Kronstadt and in the Caucasus, in Poland and in Tomsk.

Whoever is not for the revolution is a Black Hundred supporter. Whoever does not wish to allow Russian freedom to be the freedom of police rampage, bribery, drunkenness, attacks from ambush on the defenseless, must arm himself and prepare immediately for battle. We must win not a promise of freedom, not a piece of paper about freedom, but genuine freedom. We must not achieve humiliation of tsarist power, not its recognition of the rights of the people, but the destruction of this power, for tsarist power is the power of Black Hundred supporters over Russia. And this too is not our conclusion at all. This is the conclusion of life. This is the lesson of events. This is the voice of those who until now were strangers to all revolutionary teaching and who dare not take a single free step, speak a single free word in the street, at a meeting, in their own home, without exposing themselves to the most immediate and terrible danger of being trampled, torn to shreds, ripped apart by the band of tsarist supporters.

The revolution has finally forced this "popular" force to come out into the open—the force of tsarist supporters. It has forced it to show everyone openly, whom tsarist power actually relies upon, who actually sustains this power. Here they are, here is this army of brutalized police, soldiers beaten to the point of dementia, priests gone wild, savage shopkeepers, the dregs of capitalist society soaked in liquor. Here are those who now reign in Russia, with the direct and indirect assistance of nine-tenths of all our government institutions. Here it is—Russian Vendée, as much like the French Vendée as the "legitimate" monarch Nicholas Romanov is like the scoundrel Napoleon. And our Vendée too has not yet spoken its last word—do not deceive yourselves about this, citizens. It too is only just beginning to unfold as it should. It too still has "reserves of fuel" accumulated by centuries of darkness, lack of rights, serfdom, and police omnipotence. It unites in itself all the wildness of Asia with all the abominable aspects of the refined methods of exploitation and deception of all those who have been most oppressed, tortured by urban capitalist civilization, who have been reduced to a condition worse than that of beasts. This Vendée will not disappear from any manifesto of the tsar, nor from any synodal encyclical, nor from any changes in higher and lower bureaucracy. It can be broken only by the force of an organized and enlightened proletariat, for only it, being itself exploited, is capable of raising up all those standing below it, awakening in them human beings and citizens, showing them the road to liberation from all exploitation. Only it can create the nucleus of a mighty revolutionary army, mighty both in its ideals and in its discipline, in its organization, and in its heroism in struggle, before which no Vendée can stand.

And the proletariat, guided by Social-Democracy, has already begun everywhere to form this revolutionary army. Into its ranks must go everyone who does not wish to be in the army of Black Hundred supporters. Civil war knows no neutrals. Whoever stands aloof from it supports through his passivity the exulting Black Hundreds. The army itself is splitting into red and black armies. Just two weeks ago we pointed out how rapidly it is being drawn into the struggle for freedom. The example of Kronstadt showed this vividly. Let the government of the scoundrel Witte have defeated the insurrection in Kronstadt, let it now shoot hundreds of sailors who have once again raised the red flag—that flag will fly even higher, for this banner is the banner of all the laboring and exploited throughout the world. Let the servile press, like the "Novoe Vremya," cry out about the neutrality of the army—this vile and hypocritical lie scatters like smoke before each new exploit of the Black Hundreds. The army cannot be, never was, and never will be neutral. It is splitting with enormous rapidity precisely now into the army of freedom and the army of the Black Hundred. We will accelerate this split. We will consign to shame all the irresolute and wavering, all those who shrink from the idea of immediate formation of a people's militia (the Moscow Duma, according to the latest reports from foreign newspapers, rejected the project for forming a people's militia). We will tenfold increase our agitation among the masses, our organizational activity in forming revolutionary detachments. The army of conscious proletariat will then merge with the red detachments of the Russian army—and let us see whether the police Black Hundreds can overcome all of new, all of young, all of free Russia!

1 The article "Between Two Battles" from No. 20 of *Proletariat* of November 25 (12), 1905, undoubtedly belongs to Lenin (the manuscript of the article has not been preserved). Lenin's authorship is substantiated by the following data: below we print excerpts from *Le Temps* of November 10, made by Lenin and used in the article. Then the article also uses excerpts made by Lenin from the *Frankfurter Zeitung* (see Lenin Miscellany XVI, 232). Analysis of the text and comparison of a number of passages from the article with articles published in Vols. VII and VIII of the Works leave no room for doubt as to the article's attribution to Lenin. Thus, the article states: "The bargainers are shouting their final offers, shaking hands," while in Vol. VII of the Works, p. 393, we read: "A real bazaar, in which the bourgeoisie is trading away the interests and rights of Russian workers and Russian peasants. As in a bazaar, the buyer—the bourgeoisie and the seller—the tsar—clap each other on the hands, shout for the hundredth time their 'last word.'" The article contains a reference to Parvus, Cherevanin, and Martov. Lenin repeatedly in polemics mentions this trio of Mensheviks together (see, for instance, Works VIII, 212, 273, 299). Calling Witte a "minister-clown," the author of the article literally repeats the title of one of Lenin's articles: "The Plans of a Minister-Clown" (Works VIII, 345; see also 332 there). In the article it states: "This is not we alone who assert this. This is not a formulation we have devised. This is spoken by the very stones of the streets, soaked with blood, in Moscow and Odessa..." Similarly, in the article "The Tsar-Batushka and the Barricades," Lenin wrote: "This is not Priest Georgy Gapon speaking. This is spoken by those thousands and tens of thousands, those millions and tens of millions of peasants..." (Works VII, 88). When in the article we read: "Civil war...differs from other wars in that the forms of battle are far more varied, the number and composition of combatants on both sides are least susceptible to calculation and most subject to fluctuation, attempts to conclude peace or even truces do not originate from the combatants themselves and are interwoven in the most whimsical manner with military operations"—this is merely a development of Lenin's thought on "the distinction of revolutionary war from other wars" on p. 356 of Vol. VIII of the Works. Finally, the emphasis on "world-historical aims of the movement," the defense of the maximum scope of the movement and, at the same time, the indication of the perspective of the transformation of the bourgeois revolution into a socialist revolution—all these are elements of Lenin's style in the work, all of this unquestionably confirms that the author of the article is Lenin.